My Second Fondant Cake

Here is the Birthday cake I mentioned that I wanted for my son's birthday but instead of paying a fortune for it, I made it all by myself. I priced around for already made fondant but the prices were 3x more than making marshmallow fondant. So I stuck with making the mm fondant and this time instead of using regular food coloring, I found out that using paste coloring or more concentrated colors worked best with coloring fondant and so I went with Wilton's Icing Colors. They are affordable and can be bought individually or as a set if you would like a variety of colors. I then went to Wal-Mart and invested in a few round pans ( one 6", two 9", and one 12". All are 2" deep.) This only cost me about $35.00 which was cheaper than buying the set they sell for $40.00, but if you like pans that are deeper then investing in the $40 Wilton round pan set is worth it because it is 3" deep, making it an inch deeper than the pans I bought. Another reason I wanted to go with the pans I went with is because it supplied for enough guest at the event, so I just bought what I needed at the time. I also got a wider roller to roll out my fondant and the ingredients required to make my cake. For this one I used Betty Crocker's vanilla, yellow and marble (vanilla w/ mocha swirls) cake mix to bake a cake. I also used Betty Crocker's butter cream icing for the filling and to help the fondant designs stick to the cake. I was trying my best to cut costs and save time. I m glad I went this route since it probably would have been a pain for me to make it out of scratch the day before the party and it turned out that when I decorated the cake it took me till 4 am to finish it! I started at 4:30 pm the day before so we are talking about 12 hours of time invested into baking and decorating the cake! OMG. This is a cowboy themed birthday cake with cow prints, cowboy hats and boots in black to look like the cow spots and blue to give it color.

It stands 3 tiers tall.
Top view.